phd2 guiding assistant won't start

[TiffsAndAstro]

asks me to pick a star that isn't saturated and snr > 10. which i've done and the start button is still greyed out.

it did this before i reset everything and started from scratch.

anyone any idea why this might be ?

apologies all ignore this is seems to be doing it now without me pressing start

f$%k auto guiding. now i've reset it all and changed my guide camera to 1.5sec exposures im getting 0.8" rms so i think i'm going to sit on my hands. oops i meant 0.75"

i should be quite content with that on my non premium mount, right ?

as im showing off, i decided to try live stacking in siril, just to see how my 2min subs of alien queen profile nebula, also known as the NA neblua ngc7000 was doing and it works well. not so much my dslr and Ha but no shock there. i can see the jaws and teeth though a bit dim after a couple of frames.

So as its even clearer tomorrow night (lol) i decided to change to m57 and live stack from the start and its pretty good, but my guiding goes crap for about 8 seconds every 120 seconds. what a coincidence that it takes 8.3 seconds to stack each additional sub....

sadly i think this 2core/4thread 8 year old macbook isn't quite up to nina + phd2 + siril live stacking but its still fun test

back to ngc7000 tomorrow and hopefully my guiding is as good.

Edited June 2 by TiffsAndAstro

[michael8554]

"asks me to pick a star that isn't saturated and snr > 10. "

You only see that GA message if you haven't launched guiding before running GA.

Launch guiding, then hit Start in GA.

Michael

[TiffsAndAstro]

2 hours ago, michael8554 said:

"asks me to pick a star that isn't saturated and snr > 10. "

You only see that GA message if you haven't launched guiding before running GA.

Launch guiding, then hit Start in GA.

Michael

ty for this  i wish phd2 told me that rather than pick a star blah blah  

all worked out in the end, even 5 x 2mins of m31 as it was getting light  it took me a minute to work out why nina said only 14 stars visible

[TiffsAndAstro]

So I got 22 x 2min usable subs on m57. 

It's a tricky b#£&@#£d to process, and I might be flogging a dead horse. Fortunately it seems I have undiscovered sadomasochistic tendencies, so flog away I will. In my head and from others' images I've looked at, its green with a red ring around it's edge and a star(s) in the middle. Removing green noise in siril turns it blue  but I can see the red ring, though maybe that's ca. Who knows? I will flog it some more.

of course, I mistook m57 for M27 dumbbell which I should have imaged cos it's bigger don't tell anyone.

my 3 usable 2 min subs on m31 as sun rose are not apod quality who knew? But m32 was definitely still there and heading right at us.

Hopefully I have 30 x 2 mins on NGC 7000 the alien queen skull (as it is now known except for some colonial rebels ) but been to scared to post process it yet but did see the jaws/teeth in a quick auto stretch preview. 

For a non premium telescope and stock dslr no filters and  with no astro darkness I'm quite chuffed. Again.

also 0.8" RMS auto guiding with my non premium mount  ......mostly. 

Would like to say thank you all,  again, for so much help from so many people on this forum. It would be a huge struggle without it.

[TiffsAndAstro]

i think this must be my best image so far. almost 90 minutes of 120sec subs.   

or am i just over stretching noise?

 

[michael8554]

" i wish phd2 told me that rather than pick a star blah blah "

The whole message is :

"Choose a non-saturated star with a good SNR (>= 10)  and begin guiding"

Michael

Edited June 3 by michael8554

[TiffsAndAstro]

2 hours ago, michael8554 said:

" i wish phd2 told me that rather than pick a star blah blah "

The whole message is :

"Choose a non-saturated star with a good SNR (>= 10)  and begin guiding"

Michael

Yeah but often the buttons on the bottom row (apart from stop )  are unresponsive to mouse clicks.

Next chance I get ill run through it again and if my results are decent won't touch them again.

Except exposure time. That seems like it needs to be tweaked from 1 to 2 seconds when changing target.

Cheers for the help.